The US Happiness Decline in International Context

The United States is one of 60 countries (out of 148) whose life satisfaction fell as income grew between 2010 and 2024, placing its within-country slope at the 18th percentile of the international distribution. The US is not an outlier in the cross-sectional sense — at its income level, its reported wellbeing is close to what the global trend predicts. And while its negative within-country slope…